Podcast Episode 7 | Social Media & Student Loans

Speaker 1: 00:02 From Spaugh Dameron Tenny, it's White Coat Wellness, a show for doctors who are ready to improve their financial wellness. We know you work hard to help your patients, but you can't be at your best if you don't have your own finances in order. In White Coat Wellness, we highlight real life stories from physicians and dentists to educate, encourage and inspire you to personal, professional and financial wellness.

Speaker 1: 00:25 Now from Spaugh Dameron Tenny, please welcome your host, Shane Tenny.

Speaker 2: 00:31 This episode of White Coat Wellness brought to you by CommonBond, simpler, smarter student loans for a brighter future, at commonbond.co.

Shane Tenny: 00:43 All right, welcome back. This is Shane Tenny with White Coat Wellness. Excited to have you with us again today where we're going to be talking about social media and student loans. Two topics that can strike fear and confusion in the heart of many folks, especially those wearing white coats and juggling a busy schedule and today we're going to try to cover both of them.

Shane Tenny: 01:02 My guest today is Dr. Sean Fox. Currently, Dr. Fox is a professor of emergency medicine and a professor of pediatrics and a part of the resident leadership team for the emergency medicine residency program at Carolinas Medical Center, part of the Atrium healthcare network in Charlotte, North Carolina. In addition to his academic and clinical work, he also manages several educational websites geared toward the practice of emergency medicine. He's worked towards a podcast and just brings I think, some good perspective about both our topics today.

Shane Tenny: 01:37 Join me in welcoming Dr. Fox. Sean, thanks for being here today.

Dr. Sean Fox : 01:40 Wonderful being here. Lofty goals, but I think we can achieve some of them.

Shane Tenny: 01:44 One of the things I think that's fascinating about you and your story is how you've really embraced social media, that's something that can feel real daunting and confusing through podcasting, through blogs, to serve your colleagues in your community. So maybe you just start by sharing us a little bit about how you got started with all that.

Dr. Sean Fox : 02:06 Sure. Most of my endeavors are selfishly based. I initially had looked at some of these tools that we have at our fingertips as ways of improving myself to be honest. I was asked a long time ago, back at the end of my residency in 2007 to help one of my mentors generate some online information. He was a gentleman who was on the cutting edge of being innovative in using some of the tools that physicians were just starting to become aware of it, which is kind of silly to think about. Only a decade or so ago we were still quite infantile in our application of these tools. But nonetheless, I took it upon myself to write a weekly educational pearl as it was called back then, and it became very useful for myself to have to think about how to salient points in a concise fashion, as he had laid out the plan, they were supposed to be bite size pearls or nuggets.

Dr. Sean Fox : 03:07 When I graduated and moved down from Baltimore to Charlotte, I realized that habit that I had generated became useful anyway. And then I thought, "Well, there's people here that will also potentially benefit from this as well." The information was initially geared just towards my colleagues in Baltimore. Well now I started to explore, "Well, what tools do I have that could make it more applicable to anyone anywhere?" That was right around the time that you could make your own website really pretty easily without having any coding knowledge. Again, all of this I'd done with being very naive to any real skill set of how to do this. I just dove in and kind of played with things until I could figure him out.

Dr. Sean Fox : 03:59 Around that timeframe, we had also just started to have tools that you could do that. So Mac, Apple product had iWeb, which doesn't even exist anymore, but was the first you can do it yourself, make a website, and I did that. Through that I just became a little bit more savvy with some of the skills. It led me to different avenues of encountering individuals who had similar ideas.

Dr. Sean Fox : 04:24 From the social media standpoint, I was 200% against social media because I didn't, and I don't care what Tom Cruise had for lunch, if Lady Gaga is going on a field trip with her best friend; it doesn't impact my life and I've got too many other things to worry about. I'm worried about my job. I'm worried about my kids. I'm worried about my wife. I'm worried about how to get to work with the construction on my road. That's the stuff that I'm focusing on.

Dr. Sean Fox : 04:55 Social media I was very against, but as I started to dive into this realm, I realized that if you are a generator of content, if you are generating information and you're just kind of slap it on a wall but the room is dark, no one will see it. So you have to have a way to illuminate it. You have to have a way to broadcast it. I started looking at myself as a broadcaster or someone who generates information and sends it out to the ether out there.

Dr. Sean Fox : 05:24 Well, other people on different bandwidths will pick up things in different ways. Maybe they are using Twitter to communicate. Well I need to now know how to send that information to them. Maybe they are using LinkedIn or back in the day, Google Plus, or all these different social media tools and I looked at them as just tools. And I started to realize I can now collaborate with individuals that are nowhere near me on topics that are very interesting and that we have in common. Now we can actually begin to move a needle.

Dr. Sean Fox : 06:01 Through those conversations I started to collaborate with individuals in New Zealand and Australia and in Europe and became more invested in the web as the actual physicality of this enterprise of being interrelated with individuals that you don't physically touch or see, and being able to produce content that they saw as valuable and I could comment on things that I saw as valuable and can start to really have interesting academic conversations. I realized it's not social media that I'm using; I'm using a collaborative media.

Dr. Sean Fox : 06:44 There's nothing against individuals that want to talk about what you had for lunch. There is a potential benefit for that. It's social networking in that way, but from my professional standpoint, I don't want to intermingle those two realms because then I find it to be a very muddied water. Who am I listening to? Am I listening to Sean Fox, the professor of emergency medicine who is giving me information about how to manage certain entities and certain problems or my listening to Sean Fox who has a political agenda or who really loves hoagies? I don't know that there's great utility in merging those two rounds all the time.

Dr. Sean Fox : 07:26 There are people that have a lot of [inaudible 00:07:29] and a lot of personality and that comes through and some people do enjoy that. You're not going to see that with what I post. It's going to be factual and you will never see anything about my family. You're not going to know where I'm going on vacation. Mostly because I don't want you to try to find me there.

Shane Tenny: 07:45 A high likelihood for most of your followers.

Dr. Sean Fox : 07:47 Yes, yes, always. Lots of selfie sticks taking pictures next to me.

Dr. Sean Fox : 07:52 I like to keep the two worlds separate and I strategically do that by talking about collaborative media from an academic standpoint and a professional standpoint. That also I think has its benefits in that now I can make sure I am acting professionally all the time when I do post things. As you know before you hit the publish button, you probably know ... that's like the most nervous I am. Of anything I'm getting ready to publish, I know that once I hit the button I can't suck it back and try to undo whatever harm was done. So I need to make sure it is of superior quality. I need to make sure that I'm not going to be offensive. All the normal professional things that we would do, then all of a sudden if you start blending in social norms can get a little gray.

Shane Tenny: 08:40 Clarify for us; how many blogs are you writing now or how many different sites are you collaborating on?

Dr. Sean Fox : 08:47 Since 2008, and it was revised in 2010, the PedEMMorsels ... so PedEMMorsels was published. That has about, I can't even remember how many posts in there, that's published weekly, so for the past decade. And then we have the EMGuideWire, which really was generated for podcast delivery. It's a website that not quite weekly, but several times a month have our residents in the emergency medicine program sit down and collaborate and come up with a podcast that is a series for topics of emergency medicine. That's been in existence for the past year and some change.

Dr. Sean Fox : 09:35 We also have cmcecg.com which is an EKG tool. We have CMC ECG Masters, which is a website that's geared really for my colleagues. Has a bunch of tools they can use in the practice of medicine. There's MedEd Masters, which was one of my first ones that I made. That one kind of exists as a portal for other interesting educational topics. But the main two ones are the PedEMMorsels and EMGuideWire.

Shane Tenny: 10:05 Where you have a national or global following and participation?

Dr. Sean Fox : 10:10 Correct.

Shane Tenny: 10:11 I know one of the questions I've heard from other folks, in fact maybe even some listening today that have thought, "Oh I want to start something or I have information that I don't want just hanging in a dark room. I want to be able to get that out where people can collaborate on it." Being part of a large hospital system, were there any loopholes or hurdles or things like that that you had to navigate just within the administration to start collaborating in the method that you are?

Dr. Sean Fox : 10:41 The real answer is I just decided to do it myself. The PedEMMorsels are generated completely outside the confines of the work environment. So I didn't really feel I needed to include the multiple firewalls that exist. Once you start dealing with a larger corporation, they have obvious self interest and things can get delayed. I don't have time in my life for delays. I've got my own schedule that I need to keep.

Dr. Sean Fox : 11:12 The EMGuideWire interestingly is published all within the confines of the office at the hospital and actually has started to garner some interest from other departments at the hospital. But we've kept it also outside the firewall. There's no patient information. We don't speak of individual medical patients; we speak of medical problems. And we'd never use any identifying information that would be transferable, relatable, back to an individual. So in that way we can kind of keep the world separate. That has made it much more fluid for me, from a scheduling standpoint. It then now puts the onus on me to do things. I can't ask the IT department to help me do things, but double edged sword, which is a little bit easier for me to handle.

Dr. Sean Fox : 12:06 My wife might look at me sideways when I'm sitting on the couch doing some writing or publishing and she's like, "I'm not sure what you're doing. You're not getting paid for any of this." I don't do woodworking. I don't have any other hobbies. So we call this a jobie. It's a fair amount of work, but it is my jobie/hobby.

Shane Tenny: 12:26 How much time does it take? It sounds like you're keeping up with a lot of different places and a lot of different plates spinning. How do you fit it in?

Dr. Sean Fox : 12:37 I mean I've gotten much more efficient at it than I used to be. I was very clunky and in the infantile stage, it took a really long time. But now I've got methods for rather rapid research of content. I can review literature pretty quickly. I've also lived long enough in the clinical environment so I can see the clinical questions, not just what this paper on the surface is saying, like how it is applied, how it would be useful for one of my colleagues in the department, which is what all of the podcasts and all of the blog posts are really geared towards is some true clinical applicability. So in the course of just experiencing life and living my job as long as I have, it's afforded me the ability to see the paths that make it a little bit more interesting, the angles.

Dr. Sean Fox : 13:34 This week's morsel will probably take me between six and eight hours in total to do. From concept development to research to writing it probably three hours and three hours for each. I wish I read faster. I don't, I'm just borderline literate so it can take me a while.

Shane Tenny: 13:56 Do you have somebody proofread your copy before it goes out or an editor or anything?

Dr. Sean Fox : 13:58 No, I don't. As I said before though, I am the most anxious before I publish something though, because I've learned that the online community will fire back instantaneously when you've got something wrong. Or even typos; I've been hammered for a couple of typos. So I just reread it a bunch before I send it out.

Shane Tenny: 14:18 How do you figure out what topics you're going to cover?

Dr. Sean Fox : 14:21 I worked last night. We had an encounter of someone with hypoglycemia, a low glucose level. And the question was if they had taken a particular medicine, a sulphonylurea, what medicine would you give them to reverse this clinical picture? That'll probably be this week's morsel. So clinically I'm working and I'm seeing things and there's just enough stuff out there. We've got over 460 blog posts, but there's much more in the medical realm to dive into.

Shane Tenny: 14:54 So you're not just the consultant, you're also the practitioner?

Dr. Sean Fox : 14:58 Correct? Again, still a selfish endeavor. A lot of times the clinical questions that I write the answers to are the ones that I just asked myself the night before.

Shane Tenny: 15:09 Yeah, yeah. I know you, in addition to your blogs, you've been working aggressively on podcasting over the last year, and you and your colleague, Dr. Allen, entered the local public radio station podcast contest. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that and what that experience was like, what you learned.

Dr. Sean Fox : 15:28 That was the Queen City PodQuest, which was developed by the NPR affiliate here in Charlotte WFAE. We had been dreaming of topics that we wanted to cover and actually one of my residents heard on the radio that the PodQuest was coming into fruition into town and we had already started our EMGuideWire, we're like, "We should do something there." I was like, "We'll have to tailor it differently because NPR is looking for community stuff, not just what doctors want to know."

Dr. Sean Fox : 16:05 One of our focuses has been on educating our community. In fact I think all physicians are educators. Whether you're in academic medicine or community based practice, you are an educator and the most important group of people you educate are not necessarily medical students or residents or other colleagues, but it's your patients.

Dr. Sean Fox : 16:25 A lot of physicians know this probably not dissimilar from yourself, when you have an area of expertise, your neighbor is the one that's going to ask you some of the most interesting questions. I'm sure you get a lot of neighborly questions about what I should do with my money. I get a lot of neighborly questions about, "Hey Johnny or Susie fell down. Do I need to take them to the emergency department? Do I need to go to urgent care? They have a fever, what do we do?" Is his ear infected?" So the purposes of our Next Door Docs podcast that we were going to develop was to help answer some of those questions.

Dr. Sean Fox : 17:03 The whole adventure that we went on with WFAE was really fun. We got to hang out with a lot of their talents and see how they work and see what not only tools they use but their preparation. A whole lot of work goes into a little bit of time on the radio I'll tell you that.

Shane Tenny: 17:19 It was really impressive from what you'd said previously.

Dr. Sean Fox : 17:22 It's really profound and humbling really. You're like, "Oh, I'm just going to sit down and talk into this microphone and it'll be great." And then you realize, "Oh, the people that do that really spend a lot of time honing that craft."

Dr. Sean Fox : 17:34 We came in second place, which was actually really exciting. We got first place for the fan favorite. Overall, we'll take that as victory. And we still have that on our to-do list to generate that and hopefully in the next year we'll have that out in publication.

Shane Tenny: 17:50 That'll be neat. Well, I can't wait to help give that a shout out once it goes live right here.

Shane Tenny: 17:56 I want to ask, you said at the top of the episode here that we're going to talk a little bit about your work in social media and collaborating, but also I know you've got a real perspective on education as the director of the Emergency Medicine Department. So when we get back from this break, I want to ask you a couple questions about that.

Dr. Sean Fox : 18:12 Sure.

Will Koster: 18:17 I'm Will Koster. And on this episode's White Coat Wisdom sponsored by CommonBond, we're talking about student loans, specifically paying back your student loans. You worked hard for your degrees and chances are you're one of the many physicians or dentists that had to borrow quite a bit to get through school. My question for you is when is the last time you thought about your repayment strategy?

Will Koster: 18:39 If you're not pursuing public service loan forgiveness or on an income driven repayment plan, then you should really consider reducing your interest rates through student loan refinancing. In fact, our team at Spaugh Dameron Tenny has partnered with CommonBond to offer our clients discounted rates that you can't find anywhere else because we know it's an important part of your finances.

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Will Koster: 19:20 Also, if you're still in training but you have your job lined up, you can refinance now and keep payments on hold until you start working. This is a great way to start saving on interest sooner and build some cash before you transition into practice.

Will Koster: 19:33 If you're interested to see if refinancing is the right repayment strategy for you, you can head to cbpartner.co/sdt or you can reach out to our team at Spaugh Dameron Tenny directly. Again, that link is cbpartner.co/sdt.

Shane Tenny: 19:52 Okay, Dr. Fox, you have been serving I guess just recently been promoted to the director of the Emergency Medicine Department at Carolinas Medical Center.

Dr. Sean Fox : 20:03 For the residency program, yeah.

Shane Tenny: 20:06 I know you're really passionate about that. What do you like best about that work and overseeing residents?

Dr. Sean Fox : 20:13 There's just a significant amount of positive energy when you're around young, brilliant minds. Again, as I had said before, a lot of things I do are really just selfishly geared. I find that personally I work best when I'm surrounded by individuals who are not only passionate but super inquisitive and ask me questions that maybe make me a little uncomfortable because then means I have to go home and continue to refine my own skill set.

Dr. Sean Fox : 20:45 What your listeners might not quite know is the gem that Carolinas Medical Center Emergency Medicine Residency Program is. It's been in existence since 1976 and emergency medicine really came into being just a few years before that. It's a relatively young profession. The practice of emergency medicine at Carolinas Medical Center has been at the top across the spectrum, across the country and is one of the premier places to train. It's a very unique environment. What also makes it extremely unique is that it is a community based hospital still. It's not a university. It's got all the resources that a large quaternary center would have, but our focus still is on assisting our neighbors and our community.

Dr. Sean Fox : 21:37 The individuals that come to train with us are not just proficient and brilliant and from all across the country, but come with the understanding that they're coming to serve our community, which is a little bit different perspective than some other training programs, which are also great. But I think we have the best of both worlds and we get the cream of the crop, just the top notch people to train. And the people that are training and everyone except for myself is unbelievably brilliant and also internationally renowned for their areas of expertise. You get to work alongside these people that are passionate about caring for patients. People that are passionate about teaching others how to appropriately care for patients is just a really fun and energizing area to be. It's not often that you get to say that about your job.

Dr. Sean Fox : 22:36 The practice of emergency medicine is in itself is fascinating and entertaining at times, but definitely energizing. But then you take that and you put it into this context of these amazing humans I get to work with. It's really quite gratifying to see them go on and mature and move out into our region or even go back to the states they came from and continue to train others and practice caring for people. Makes you a little paternalistic but very kind of proud parent like. That's the most fun.

Shane Tenny: 23:11 I know that one of the things that we see in interacting with residents and fellows week in and week out that you're certainly aware of is just the I guess I might go so far as to say the word crisis around student loans and just the enormous debt that folks are finishing medical school with. I know you had kind of a frustrating experience just personally with your own student loans. I wondered if you might talk a little bit about that and I guess what your opinion on the topic is.

Dr. Sean Fox : 23:41 I thought we were just having fun here, but now you're just going to-

Shane Tenny: 23:43 It's all business.

Dr. Sean Fox : 23:45 ... throw me off the building. Here comes gravity.

Dr. Sean Fox : 23:47 That wasn't fun at all. I did a five year residency. You can put off paying your loans for only so long and unfortunately my time for that was shorter than my time of residency. So I started to make changes with my loan repayment plans towards the fourth year and then into my fifth year, had the opportunity to consolidate my loans, which at that time, because how the stock market was and financial institutions, I had a really good deal with my interest rate, which I thought was phenomenal.

Dr. Sean Fox : 24:24 This past year I realized that maybe that consolidation was not the best advice, or at least the way I consolidated my loans back then was not the best advice, because it led to me being unable to have the loan forgiveness program applied to me, which was big kick in the gut, particularly when we've never missed a payment. My wife is super on top of all this stuff. I am not, but she's super on top of all this and has always been, and we were very excited when we thought we might be able to qualify. And then it was again, a big bit of gravity when we realized it didn't work out.

Dr. Sean Fox : 25:07 When I think about how we train physicians, we don't do a very good job of training the clinicians on management of their own finances. That's not a novel statement I just made. But maybe the perception would be different if we roped it into the concept of wellness because we are now starting to pay more attention to that. Not just physical wellness but emotional wellness, psychiatric wellness of the clinician. And we know that that's really important. Well, there's a large percentage of that that is wrapped into, or at least married to your finances. We know that marital discord happens because of finances. We know that all kinds of unrest internally and externally happen because of financial misgivings.

Shane Tenny: 26:04 Is there something that you see with ... I mean, I so appreciate your comment and couldn't agree more. Certainly that's our perspective that there's a whole lot wrapped into wellness and one aspect is finances, and the opposite of that causes an enormous amount of stress for the physician, the resident just trying to figure out what to do. Do you have any ideas, any suggestions? How do we get not just information which is readily available on the internet, but how do we better help provide the advice, or the counsel, or the guidance to folks when they're coming through and out of training?

Dr. Sean Fox : 26:44 It's I think a very challenging thing to resolve.

Shane Tenny: 26:49 Because you've got a huge clinical slate of the information that needs to be [crosstalk 00:26:53] as well.

Dr. Sean Fox : 26:55 There's no way we're going to make the vast majority of medical personnel experts in their finances right away. What we want to do though is make them at least fluent in the language of which other financial individuals like yourself speak, so that then when you do read something online or you do find this information and then you speak to someone else who has even a little bit more wisdom about it, you can come to your own conclusions and with their advice. What I find is when you don't know anything and you then you read something online and then two items below that one on Google is a thing that says the exact opposite and you're not even exactly sure the terms we're talking about, and then you go speak to someone else who is supposed to have more wisdom about it or more experienced with it, it's hard for me to develop an understanding that I can make an actionable plan with.

Dr. Sean Fox : 28:00 Unfortunately a lot of people then just rely on, "Well, do I trust this person who's telling this information?" We know that there's a lot of good people out there and there's incredulous people out there as well. And just the same as within the medical profession there's a lot of very altruistic physicians and there's a lot of those that are maybe less so. So it does require a rapport to be developed, I think with an individual who is more expert in that language. But it still isn't incumbent upon us as individuals to at least learn some of the language so I can have a conversation with you.

Shane Tenny: 28:39 If there's somebody listening who's a resident in your program or another hospital system around the country, what's the advice of the older, wiser physician to them in terms of, here's my best tip to you as you get started?

Dr. Sean Fox : 28:53 What would've been really nice is if I would've started sooner in having more encounters with conversations with people like yourself. Now, I didn't move here until shortly before I met you, but if I would have had the opportunity to have someone who maybe was not necessarily looking for me to invest ... Again, as a medical student, as a resident, I've got [inaudible 00:29:21]. We've got no money.

Shane Tenny: 29:23 [inaudible 00:29:24]; technical term there.

Dr. Sean Fox : 29:26 It is for all your Kung Fu Panda experts out there.

Dr. Sean Fox : 29:31 It's just like learning Spanish. I can read it in the book, but it's not helpful until I have to sit with someone and try to speak Spanish. And yes, I'm going to be terrible at it and their ears are going to hurt, but over time, the more I do that, the better the conversation goes. I think what would have been helpful is being able to have those conversations earlier in my career so that when it did come time for me to transition to actually having decent money it wasn't such a big gear shift. I had heard these things before. I had understood these terms before. I was able to ask better questions.

Dr. Sean Fox : 30:14 That's the other thing is when you start and you're so naive, you don't even know what questions to ask and you can get into a scenario. I know of individuals that have gotten to scenarios where they're just spoon fed things and they're like, "Yeah, let's do that. And then that maybe wasn't the brightest plan. Whereas if they had a little bit more knowledge, they would've asked different questions that would have led the conversation a different way.

Dr. Sean Fox : 30:40 How do those encounters, how do those earlier conversations happen? We can do it on our own, that's challenging. We can have medical schools, which I think would probably be the wisest, have medical schools have an unbiased essentially course for medical finances. By the way, in your last podcast you had an individual who then had to learn not just personal finances but business finances. So that's a whole other thing. If I'm going to go work for myself and set up my own office and then have employees, good Lord, I would have no concept of what to do with that. So in medical school, I think that would probably be the best first place and actually have a course of medical finances. That I've heard a little bit across the country and still relatively sparse.

Dr. Sean Fox : 31:32 Harder to do in residency just because there's so much other stuff that has to be consumed, which isn't ... I mean medical school has a lot of stuff to be consumed too, but their timeframe is different and what they have to do in that timeframe is a little bit more lenient. But starting the conversation earlier so that when it comes time to actually have to apply your knowledge, it's not as foreign.

Shane Tenny: 31:56 I'm going to ask the same question but a different way. In retrospect, what do you think was one of the best financial decisions that you and [Malia 00:32:04] made as you started in practice after you moved to Charlotte?

Dr. Sean Fox : 32:08 For me it was marrying Malia. That was the best because she had no debt and she had the mindset of there should be no debt and always paying everything off. And then she married a guy that was all debt and still has lots of debt. For her, it was the conversations that she and I had together about how limited our information was, how limited our understanding was, and that made us uncomfortable, so then reaching out to you. So one, having individuals that I worked with that I trusted, who then referred me to someone they trusted, which was super helpful because essentially I think the first year we were here is when we met you, so 2008 and that was eye opening. Just being able to ... You presented all the giant binder of information with pretty graphs and things and I like graphs.

Dr. Sean Fox : 33:05 Just seeing the information conveyed in a way that I understood it was super helpful. Having a wife that told me I didn't need a really fast car right away. She did let me buy a flat screen TV first in 2008, that was a big deal. Not so much of a big deal anymore.

Shane Tenny: 33:22 So kind of consistent with your earlier answer, which in looking at your own life, one of the best things for you is just getting started early. Don't keep your head in the sand. Don't walk around in the fog. Just reach out, find somebody to help and get you pointed in the right direction.

Dr. Sean Fox : 33:38 Yeah. That savings, we all know that compounded interest really is a powerful thing and starting sooner is the way to go and the converse of that is very detrimental.

Shane Tenny: 33:51 Yeah. Sean, thanks for being with us today. Can you tell everybody how to follow you on Twitter, how do they track you down?

Dr. Sean Fox : 33:58 The easiest one is @pedemmorsles. So P-E-D-E-M-M-O-R-S-L-E-S. But there's also @emguidewire and @nextdoordocs, because why only have one Twitter feed when you can have three.

Shane Tenny: 34:12 Excellent. Well Sean, thanks so much for being with us today.

Dr. Sean Fox : 34:15 It was really great being here.

Will Koster: 34:20 I'm Will Koster. And on this episode's White Coat Achievements, a segment that highlights noteworthy achievements by your friends and colleagues, we're highlighting a pediatrician and what she's doing to help fight youth depression and suicide. Dr. Umeh is the founder and CEO of Teen Alive. It's an online wellness resource dedicated to creating awareness for and fighting bullying, depression and suicide in children, teens, and young adults.

Will Koster: 34:45 Dr. Umeh has a very powerful but yet very tragic story for her catalyst for starting Teen Alive and leaving her attending role. As a practicing pediatrician, she was meeting with a 15 year old patient who she believed to have depression, but his mother denied him treatment. Later that year, he died by suicide in front of his family at a barbecue.

Will Koster: 35:04 Now, in addition to what she does through Teen Alive, blogging, speaking and authoring a book, Dr. Umeh has started her own direct primary care practice to focus on high risk children and teens and to change the stigma around depression. Her ultimate goal is to save more children and prevent teen suicides. We think she's well deserving of this White Coat Achievement, and we wish her the best of luck.

Will Koster: 35:27 As always, if you know someone wearing a white coat and is achieving something noteworthy, feel free to drop us a line. Send us an email. We'd love to hear about it. But again, this episode's White Coat Achievement goes to Dr. Umeh and what she's doing to help fight teen suicide.

Shane Tenny: 35:44 Before we sign off today, I want to remind you that we're planning a series in the upcoming months on marriage and money. So if you and your spouse or a friend and their spouse that you want to volunteer would be willing to tell us how you've navigated money issues in your marriage, please drop me an email at shane@whitecoatwell.com. Finally, please take a minute to subscribe. Also give us a review on iTunes or Google play. We'd love to have you join our closed Facebook community called White Coat Wellness, specifically to help you connect with others in medicine or dentistry who want to share a life together.

Shane Tenny: 36:20 Thanks for joining us today. We'll see you back here next time.

Speaker 1: 36:24 This episode of White Coat Wellness is over, but you're not alone on your journey towards financial wellness. Spaugh Dameron Tenny has been helping physicians and dentists with their financial planning for over 60 years, and we'd love to answer any questions that would be of help to you. Visit sdtplanning.com today and take your financial wellness to new levels. Once again, that's sdtplanning.com. And we'll see you on the next episode of White Coat Wellness.